Computing devices may be used in multiple modes. An example of a computing device is a mobile (computing) device such as a smartphone, of an employee of a company, that may be used either for personal or business purposes, which reduces a proliferation of the computing devices, with the possibility of using a single computing device for different purposes thereof. However multi-mode usage of the computing device generally requires differentiating operation of the computing device accordingly. For example, when the smartphone is used for personal purposes, the corresponding costs should be billed to an account of the smartphone's user. Conversely, when the smartphone is used for business purposes, the corresponding costs should be billed to an account of the company.
For this multi-mode usage of the computing device, it is possible to configure each computing device with different profiles (or personas) according to each computing device's usage mode, so that each profile allows using the computing device with each computing device's features that are set according to the intended usage thereof. Moreover, it is possible to have different environments for the same persona but with corresponding passwords. The different environments have different user interfaces, which facilitates differentiating the usage modes of the computing device.
Another possibility is of enforcing policies onto a mobile device according to sensor data provided by one or more context sensors (for example, placing the mobile device in silent mode in a specific position), so that the behavior of the mobile device self-adapts to difference contexts. Moreover, a plurality of roles may be assigned to different user types. When the mobile device is within a locale, the role of a user of the mobile device is determined and a policy for the locale corresponding to the role of the user is applied to control one or more features of the mobile device accordingly. In this way, the mobile devices may be treated differently according to the roles of their users.
A mobile device may also have multiple management agents, which receive and enforce policies on the mobile device from external management authorities. A policy manager may be provided on the mobile device to consolidate the policies based on a current state thereof. The policy manager provides a mechanism for regulating a hierarchy of the management authorities. The management authorities may be ranked in order of the trust associated with a vendor providing the software of the management authorities.
Management systems are also used in general to manage endpoints of a data processing environment. Particularly, in a management system based on policies, each policy indicates one or more activities that have to be executed on corresponding endpoints to make the one or more activities compliant with the policy. A management server deploys the policies to the endpoints. Each endpoint directly verifies each endpoint's compliance with the policies and enforces corresponding activities to remedy any non-compliance.
The policies are managed with a centralized approach (wherein the policies are basically, defined and distributed with a client/server architecture), which may not be completely satisfactory in specific scenarios (e.g., when mobile devices are involved).
Indeed, the mobile devices are nomadic for the nature of the mobile devices. Therefore, the mobile devices may transit across a number of domains.
The mobile devices may be exposed to different contexts. Moreover, these different contexts generally change dynamically over time.
The mobile devices may support several communication channels which may not be always available (at any time/position).